Benchmarking my hardware

I recently had the chance to take most of my hardware offline so I could perform some overdue maintenance. Out of curiosity I conducted some benchmarks, just to see how the different boxes compare.

I thought I might share them with you in case you are looking for some computing resources. Also, this article serves as my external memory should I ever want to look up the results.

How to benchmark

Testing a system used to be tedious work, but now it is very simple to a) test a machine thoroughly and b) easily compare the results. I used the open source test suite Phoronix. It also produces a nice little report which I am going to show you later.

Dramatis machinae

Powered by a single AMD Athlon II Model NEO N36L with 2 cores running at 1.30 GHz and 1MB L2 it is the lowest powered machine I own and it is used as a small server that does little more than serving files.
In my configuration it uses 8 GB RAM and has 4 2GB HDs as a RAID-10 using software (mdadm) instead of dedicated hardware.
Tests ran on Debian Wheezy.

Although technically it is not hardware I own this is my preferred web server as of now as it is affordable and yet has great specs. Powered by an 8 core Intel Core i7-4770 (3.40GHz) with 32 GB RAM it can easily serve all my projects and still idle around most days. Two 2 GB hard drives as a software RAID-1 store any and all data.
Tests ran on Debian Wheezy.

Test results

Depending on what tests you decide to let run, there are a lot of results and diagrams produced. This is only a subset of the full suite I ran with Phoronix.

As expected, the HP is the slowest of the bunch, but it does not need much energy and it is a true work horse. It is a great machine for serving files.
The Zbox ID 91 did quite well, considered it is basically a laptop which doesn’t cost all that much. The SSD surely helped giving it a slight edge in some cases. However, while the ID 91 is great for many development purposes where you need some (limited) power and no high-availability it cannot act as an actual server. Not even with the dual NIC setup.
Both the Hetzner EX40 and the TS-140 with an E3-1245v3 did a very good job. There are some cases, when the i7 from the EX40 had the upper hand, in some (less) cases the E3 took a minimal lead.